Q Launches Direct Thread Silencers with Actual $200 Rebate

As part of my weekly horse beating regarding silencers and the Hearing Protection Act, I’m pleased to let you know that this afternoon at 3:00 PM Eastern, Q will be launching their Nelson line of direct thread silencers. Given the climate and the serious case of “I’m waiting for HPAitis” that the consumer market seems to have caught, Q is looking to sweeten the deal with an honest to God, real live, no joke $200 promo.

The first 100 orders each of the Half Nelson and Full Nelson will qualify for $200 off. The Half and Full Nelson are named as an ode to the 80’s wrestling heroes that Q’s founder, Kevin Brittingham, fawned over as a kid. They are also full auto rated, fully welded, titanium silencers that are capable of quieting down rifles up to 300 WIN Mag.

I had the opportunity to shoot both Nelsons on the sixteen inch barreled .308 WIN Fix rifle while I was in Georgia last month, and they both sound pretty nice, with the Half Nelson, 6.85 inches in length, being about as loud as I’d comfortably run without ear protection in that configuration. The Full Nelson, at 8.86 inches is quite a bit more pleasant and only a few ounces more. Strapped to a longer barreled 6.5 Creedmoor or .308 WIN chambered rifle, both are quite pleasant to shoot. Both Nelsons make use of a tapered mount that ensures consistent and tight lockup on the tapered or squared shoulders of your rifle barrel of choice. Ethan Lessard, Q’s VP of Engineering, is a geek about point of impact shift and lockup. In his mind, direct thread silencers with a taper mount are the future, and it’s something you can see lingering on in the Sig Sauer line he helped design and manufacture. The Nelsons make aggressive use of this mounting method while also adding a quarter inch in body diameter over the industry standard inch and a half. This extra volume helps make for a quieter silencer in a more compact package. Here’s the relevant data in bullet point form on the Half Nelson and Full Nelson silencers.

*sound testing was performed on a seven inch 300 BLK and sixteen inch 308 WIN.

Half Nelson

Caliber – 7.62 NATO / 300 BLK / 300 Win Mag

Diameter – 1.75 in

Length – 6.85 in

Weight – 12.2 oz

Attachment – direct-thread 5/8-24

Material – 100% titanium, fully welded, PVD coated

MSRP – $868

Full Nelson

Caliber – 7.62 NATO / 300 BLK / 300 Win Mag

Diameter – 1.75 in

Length – 8.86 in

Weight – 16.6 oz

Attachment – direct-thread 5/8-24

Material – 100% titanium, fully welded, PVD coated

MSRP – $899

The promo period opens up this afternoon, and here’s what you need to know, again in handy bullet point form.

What: Q will open up 100 pre-orders of each Nelson silencer (Half Nelson and Full Nelson)

Preorder one of the silencers and get $200 off. No strings, no gimmicks.

Payment is due in full at the time of your order. Once payment is received in full, your silencer will be formed to your dealer of choice.

When: Saturday, February 18th @ 3:00 PM Eastern time

Q will be on Instagram Live on when the promo opens to answer any questions you have. That session will be recorded and posted on YouTube afterwards.

After shipping and handling, the promotional preorder cost on a Full Nelson will be $714 and $683 for the Half Nelson. That’s about as inexpensive as you can reasonably purchase a full auto rated, all titanium, 30 caliber direct thread silencer in today’s market or the mythical post HPA market of your dreams.

What he said. On a bad day maybe $100 worth of material and labor. Prices on cans are ridiculous. Ain’t buying one until they are $200 out the door and I guess that will take until they are not serialized and not treated like a (expletive deleted) weapon.

LOL…..ditto. Amazes me every time I see bargain hunters wanting cans to be $200. Ain’t gonna happen. Even if the HPA passes. Fortunately people like this stay out which means more cans for the rest of us.

Your comment implies that this would cost about $25 in materials and less than an hour of machining time. That simply isn’t the case. Let’s pretend it was legal to have your friend, who owns a machine shop, make this for you. Let’s assume he’s a beast of a machinist and he can crank out a can in four hours on manual machines and he’s only charging you $50/hr for his time. You could probably find 12″ of seamless 6Al4V tube under $100 and 12″ of round bar for $150. We’re already at $450 in this mythical scenario. That doesn’t include a trendy flat black finish. Add the typical liability and over head of corporate America, and it’s easy to see why the market value is so high.

I have only two comments for your analysis
1)use of high end materials in high end stock shapes will always be for a high end product. You can get 90% there with significantly lower material cost–especially when buying in bulk.
2) if your selling these at bargain basement pricing you aren’t running a manual machine like a boss, and turning these out one at a time. At minimum, you are doing 10 mono cores at a time on a CNC mill and ripping out the attachment/outer tube on a CNC lathe–at ten per hour….which really isn’t that extreme if your start with stock close to net shape and you are using a friendly alloy.

If this market opens up- there will be significant progress in design and manufacturing- and quickly. I imagine that currently the economies of scale don’t justify it. There will also be better defined price points

A competent gunsmith is going to charge me anywhere from $250 up to 2-3x that much depending on how bad it is to true up the action on a Remington 700. Thats only labor for making 2-3 cuts on a steel cylinder made out of (comparatively) soft carbon steel. A silencer is several times more labor intensive and is made out of materials which are not only NOT cheap, are several orders of magnitude harder than the carbon steel on my Remington referenced above. You’re delusional if you think people are going to let silencers out the door for less than $200.

I talked to a guy at the range who was shooting a form1 silencer he had built himself on his buddies lathe. Sure it was quiet, but it weighed as much as the anchors on an aircraft carrier, the owner said he was having to dial in several MOA of vertical correction for POI shift at 100yds on a 18″ heavy barreled tactical rifle. On cost he calculated that he had invested about $100-150 in materials (was using some high grade heat treated stainless) and had gone through three cutting heads for his buddies lathe while milling the baffle stack, so we are talking almost $100 more in tools. Time invested was two full weekends. So this silencer, while quiet and probably very durable given how much it weighed, was probably about as cheap as you could go and involved some pretty significant compromises, yet he was into it $200-250 in material and tools and 4 full days of time (let’s call it 16hrs since he probably wasn’t working all day). Assuming your machinist charges you minimum wage that’s almost $125 in labor. A machinist doesn’t charge minimum wage so it is realistically probably several times that.

It’s really not that far feched in nations where suppressors are much easier to get they are a lot cheaper about $340 in new Zealand and that’s with no where near the market the US has. Once everybody and their brother can buy 5 no problem, seeing these things in the $200-$300 range is a given hell once ruger or some other company starts casting baffles sub $200 is possible

This horse has been beaten to a bloody pulp… seriously. Euro suppressors =/= American suppressors, they are built for an entirely different market and the materials and workmanship reflectthat. They are designed for use primarily on single shot or bolt action low volume of fire smaller caliber center fire arms or rim fire. Lots are made out of aluminum or at best lower grades of stainless steel. They are also user serviceable (you can take them apart) because they are not designed to handle high rates of fire from semi auto much less full auto, and they dont have to handle large overbore magnum cartridges. You take a 30cal can from Europe and slap it on a 300RUM or Norma Mag and you just created a hand grenade on your muzzle. They are built for two entirely different end users. Also, because they are easier to obtain there is not nearly as much emphasis on quick detach for use on multiple hosts, both because it is hard to own multiple hosts in Europe and if you somehow do own multiple hosts, its easy enough to just get another can once youve jumped through all the hoops to own a gun. Good QD latch systems are complicated and add additional material and labor cost to making a suppressor.

So please, for the love of God or any other deity you acknowledge, stop comparing a lightwieght, direct thread, user serviceable aluminum/steel single shot rifle can like those common in Europe to a fully welded, inconel/stellite + precip hardened stainless or titanium tube quick detach short barrel full auto + magnum rated can. They arent the same, not even close.

If all you want is a heavy all steel cheap direct thread can there are already a couple entrants in the market pushing $300-$400 cans for 556 and 30cal, there are at least one or two rimfire cans out there creeping towards $150 or so. You give up a lot of durability and features on those cans, but to think the higher range cans are going to come down very much in price is just flat out delusional.

Also, people seem to ignore the fact that even a good quality muzzle brake already costs close to, or in a lot of cases more than $100, and those are usually cheap grades of carbon steel and involve a mere fraction of the material cost and labor that goes into making a quality silencer.

For 55 USD, I’d happily deal with a pansy euro light-weight, direct-thread rimfire silencer designed for single shots.

Different market/purpose than US silencers? Of course. As good as even the cheapest rimfire can on silencershop? Probably not. But I’d still take one. Hell, I’d probably buy a few and use them as stocking stuffers.

I think I might just have to buy one of these things. I am not going to count on the HPA to get passed. I think there are too many squishy republicans to get it done. If it does pass, then I get my $200 back.